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Sunday, 10 February 2013

It's custard bath night

One of my favourite blogs is this one and one of my favourite things about it is her list of joyful things down the left hand side (even better, indeed, is the list of advice - "considering over-wintering roosters in your study? Don't" - but I don't have any of that, except GET AN ACCOUNTANT and that isn't quite in the spirit of the thing). So I thought I would try and do mine today. I made myself avoid all the obvious ones (nest webcams, Yorkshire Gold tea, David Sedaris, hairy ponies, Nancy Mitford, salted caramel, gloomy crime fiction). I know this is the blog equivalent of a warm bath of custard but I don't much care, it has been a long week and I am feeling quite fretful and a warm bath of custard sounds very nice, actually. A warm bath of anything, indeed, our bath is buggered.

Joyful things:

Jays in the garden (I only found out they were jays last year, but they're wild like something out of a zoo, or something that got lost on its way to Africa).
Brightly coloured fine leather gloves. My current ones are a sort of acid green and even the children covet them.

Relics, the grislier the better, but especially whole preserved digits, limbs, or indeed saints.
Orange spine Penguin PG Wodehouse books, inherited from my parents.
Kenneth from 30 Rock.
Having enough scissors.
Hyacinths.
Béchamel with spinach and a pinch of nutmeg or mace. I had this in a pasta gratin last night in front of that ludicrous Richard III documentary with a nice glass of cheap red wine.
Bracken.
Spotting tiny dirty brown mice, all busy and surprising, on the Central Line tracks.
And getting divebombed by packs of delinquent parakeets.
Lemon curd.
The smell of stables, straw and turpentine and leather and dust and warm horse.
The smell of sugar beet on damp North Yorkshire autumn air, even though it is actually an awful smell.
Or the smell of After Eights on cold North Yorkshire winter nights, which is wholly delicious.
The smell of Soho on hot summer evenings before it all kicks off: spice and posh cologne and beer and hair product and hot tarmac.
Mars Attacks.
3/4 length sleeves.
Lichen.
The produce tent at village shows. And the tea tent, actually. And the 'dog that looks most like its owner' class.
Vuillard interiors.
Christine Ferber rhubarb jam.
Vetiver (especially Miller Harris Vetiver Bourbon).
Warm pub gin and tonics with the barest sliver of melted ice and a crappy half slice of lemon.
With a packet of Walkers Cheese and Onion. (Oh god I want this so much now).
Parrot tulips.
Patent leather.
Sunday breakfast at Midi market, Moroccan pancake with honey and a glass of sweet mint tea for €1,25.
The word 'baleful'.
Working at my kitchen table. I have a perfectly good office, but I just can't resist. This morning the light was just beautiful, with a tiny dusting of snow and a fat pigeon making its rounds. Here is a terrible picture of it.

You can just see a fat pigeon sitting on the wall to the right.

Mexican wrestling outfits.

Tiny dark red Spartan apples.

Urban foxes, all insolent and unruffled and rifling through your binbags.

I would love to hear yours, ideally avoiding your top five or ten. The weirder the better.

Dead ivy vines on the side wall, they are absolutely transcendent (also quite drought-resistant).

The river out front, boring, I know. It might not rage (and god knows we wouldn't want it to), but damn, it's a river and it is very frequently quite beautiful.

Seeing something good come out of bad situations, this is not so rare actually--saw something like this just yesterday morning. (it was in no way related to carnaval...though a 'glass' carriage with black horses did do a u-turn in the street...this is not a street designed for turning around a team of horses, I can assure you)

Visionaries, and not just because they sound so ethereal, but because they are the ones who ALWAYS save our asses. They could not be more pedestrian, but so crucial that we should be forced to walk on our knees from Amsterdam to Brussels in honor of them (and because it would be faster than the train).

My father used to get a scrub jay in the backyard (Aphelocoma californica) to perch on his hand and eat nuts. He always enjoyed hearing about sugar beets in Europe, this was joyful for him. My dad, not the scrub jay, the scrub jay could give a fuck.

Mine are:- cos sack dresses, the blacker the better- spiky greyhound elbows when they try to be lap dogs and fail miserably- slippers that are so warm my feel constantly sweat- the cat that sits on our doorstep, nonchalantly torturing the dogs who watch it from the window- my lovely folio society Thomas Hardy books which were a present from my grandmother-in-law and are just as good as ornaments as they are to read.

The smell of dogs feet - sniff the weepette, it's like slightly overcooked biscuits.Summer rain on hot tarmacThe cloud of smoke when a farrier is fitting shoes...burnt pony toenails, mmm mmm Bad boys' leather jackets - part BO, part pub, part something elseBoots own brand suntan lotion, takes me back to bumming round Europe before I was a grown up

At this present time it is sitting in my study, pretending to work but really spending the day watching the ducks and swans and geese trying to paddle against the current of a very fast flowing river Thames. Or even better going with the current facing backwards like a white water ride!

When I walk into my sisters house and her dog, who is my true love, realises it is me.

When my husband, even when he is in the depths of sleep, lies on top of me in bed to keep me warm.

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